You Ask Anybody

by B. M. Bower

The lank man snorted and reached under his coat tail for the solacing, plug of chewing tobacco. “Why, hell, man, you come down around that hairpin turn, up there, on two wheels!” he complained.

Casey grunted and turned away uninterested. “I’ve done it on one,” he belittled the achievement. “The leaders wasn’t runnin’ good, to-day. That nigh one’s tenderfooted. I gotta see about havin’ him shod before the next trip.” He started off, then paused to fling reassurance over his shoulder. “Don’t you never worry none about Casey’s driving. Casey can drive. You ask anybody.”

Well, that was Casey’s youth. Part of it. The rest was made up of reckless play, fighting for the sheer love of action, love that never left a scar across his memory and friendships that laughed at him, laughed with him, and endured to the end. Along the years behind him he left a straggling procession of men, women, and events, that linked themselves reminiscently in the memory of those who knew him. “Remember the time Casey licked that Swede foreman up at Gold Gap?” one would say. “Remember that little girl Casey sent back to her folks in Vermont—and had to borrow the money to pay her fare, and then borrow the money to play poker to win the money to pay back what he borrowed in the first place? Borrowed a hundred dollars from Ed Blair, and then borrowed another hundred off Ed the next day and boned Ed to set into a game with him, and won the money off Ed to pay Ed back. That’s Casey for yuh!”

As for the events, they were many and they had the Casey flavor, every one of them. A few I should like to tell you, and I’m going to begin with one which shows how Casey was born an optimist and never let life get the better of him, no matter what new wallop it invented.

From the days when his daily drives were apt to be interrupted by holdups—and once by a grizzly that rose up in front of his leaders on a sharp turn and all but made an end of Casey and his record for shaving death close and never drawing blood—Casey drifted from mountain to desert, from desert to plain, blithely meeting hard luck face to face and giving it good day as if it were a friend. That was the remarkable trait which Casey possessed. Nothing downed him, because he never seemed to know when he was whipped, but thought it merely an incident of the game. Cheerfulness was in the bones of him—though he had a temper as Irish as his name.

So, in time, it happened that Casey was driving stage from Pinnacle down to Lund and making boast that his four horses could beat any automobile that ever infested the trail. Infest was the word Casey would have used often had he known the dictionary contained it. Having been deprived of much knowledge of books, but having a facile imagination and some creative ability, Casey invented words of his own and applied them lavishly to all automobiles and, in particular and emphatically, he applied the spiciest ones to Fords.

Put yourself in Casey’s place and sympathize with him. Imagine yourself with a thirty-mile trip down a twisty, rough mountain road built in the days when men hauled ore down the mountain on wagons built to bump over rocks without damage to anything but human bones. You never stopped for stage robbers or grizzlies in the past, and you have your record as the hardest driver in the West to maintain. You pop the lash over the heads of your leaders and go whooping down a long, straight bit of road where you count on making time. And when you are away halfway down and the four horses are at a gallop and you are happy, around the turn below comes a Ford, rattling its various joints, trying to make the hill in “high.”

More likely than not, the driver honks his horn at you to turn out—and you are Casey Ryan, of whom men talk from El Paso to Butte, from Denver to Spokane. Wouldn’t you writhe, and wouldn’t you swear, and wouldn’t you hate the man who invented Fords? Yet you would turn out. You would have to, unless the Ford did—and Fords don’t. A Ford will send a twin-six swerving to the rocky rim of a road, and even Casey Ryan must swing his leaders to the right in obedience to that raucous challenge.

Casey had the patience of all optimists, and for a long while he had contented himself with his vocabulary and the record he held of making the thirty miles from Pinnacle to Lund in the same time a Ford would make it. He did not, by the way, say what his stage cost him in repairs, nor did he mention the fact that Lund and Pinnacle citizens rode with him once and then never again, and that his passengers were mostly strangers picked up at the railroad station at Lund because they were tickled with the picturesque four-horses-and-Casey stage. He had never killed anybody with his record, but he had almost.

Once Casey did not turn out. That morning he had been compelled to stop and whip a heavy man who came up and berated him because the heavy man’s wife had ridden from Pinnacle to Lund the day before, and had fainted at the last turn, and had not revived in time to catch the train for Salt Lake, which she had been anxious to catch; so anxious that she had ridden down with Casey rather than take the narrow-gauge train which carried ore and passengers and mail to Lund every day, arriving when most convenient to the train crew.